Observations over Hurricanes from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument

Abstract

There is an apparent inconsistency between the total column ozone derived from the total ozone mapping spectrometer (TOMS) and aircraft observations within the eye region of tropical cyclones. The higher spectral resolution, coverage, and sampling of the ozone monitoring instrument (OMI) on NASA s Aura satellite as compared with TOMS allows for improved ozone retrievals by including estimates of cloud pressure derived simultaneously using the effects of rotational Raman scattering. The retrieved cloud pressures from OM1 are more appropriate than the climatological cloud-top pressures based on infrared measurements used in the TOMS and initial OM1 algorithms. We find that total ozone within the eye of hurricane Katrina is significantly overestimated when we use climatological cloud pressures. Using OMI-retrieved cloud pressures, total ozone in the eye is similar to that in the surrounding area. The corrected total ozone is in better agreement with aircraft measurements that imply relatively small or negligible amounts of stratospheric intrusion into the eye region of tropical cyclones